Post-hose happiness. That tongue!
This is a good season to re-read Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 essay on Luddites.
Working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I am regularly amazed that she could turn in a typescript of a novel and then hold the book in her hands six weeks later. Book publishers worked fast in those days, and largely mechanically: typewriters, Linotype, Monotype, letterpress printing. Zoom!
What if the chatbots just enter a state of transcendent bliss and end up ignoring us altogether? That’s a win/win, right?
The people at Fonts In Use are choosing the path of righteousness
Speaking of Robertson Davies: I only like seven or eight of the dozens and dozens of essays I have published, but one of those is largely about Davies.
I wrote about the physical counterpart of Lord Peter Wimsey … and some of his pupils.
Honored to be in my buddy Austin Kleon’s newsletter this morning. Me and Tolstoy.
Italo Calvino (1983):
I belong to that portion of humanity — a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.